Saturday, May 19, 2012

I haven't been working too much on my comic book recently, so no new artwork posts.

I have been rummaging through my old comic book collection and getting ready to get rid of stuff. And while it's sad to part with some of these, I think it's high time I purged myself of some of these books (again). And it's probably a good idea to do this on a yearly (maybe even twice yearly) basis.

I have too much.

I'm getting rid of stuff that I'm pretty sure I won't read again and some things I already have trades or hardcovers of. There are also quite a few that I really don't like. Unfortunately I still have a ton that I still love for the art or still dig the storylines. I have 11 shortboxes and 2 longboxes worth or comic books. And those are just the floppies. I have 2 bookshelves chock full of graphic novels and a half bookself's worth of manga.

Yeah. I'm a comic book hoarder.

Even though I don't REALLY care much about selling these guys, I can't help but look at online comic book price guides while I'm sorting through them all. The over-ridding factor though, is that I don't really have the time to sell these things nor do I want to sell them to collectors like me. No e-bay posts for my stuff.

I might try the local bookstore and get some credit for some of my manga, but otherwise I'll just donate them to the goodwill nearby. I figure maybe I can let some other non-collector-y, non-comic book reading type people enjoy these comics. Maybe I can spread the joy of comics!

It's around one longbox full of stuff. Eventually, I'd like to have just 2 longboxes worth of the floppies, but that'll take some time and letting go. Also, collecting manga is really amazingly space-consuming. Where do the japanese otaku keep all this stuff?

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

So the prints I had ordered from Ka-Blam are back. I noticed their paper stock had changed from the first issue, so I sent in an order for the first issue to test that out along with my second issue.

The first issue's print with the new paper stock is okay. The printer seems to have a problem with pinks/magentas and blues. My sky blue color is more of an aqua-ish (closer to blue) hue, but the new printing seems to just drop the green and prints out a blue.

My magenta/pink colors become more of a red and are really printing bright.

Can you tell which print is which?

So in the picture above, The first print is on the left and the second print is on the right. On the cover, the colors are less saturated than the first print and is not too bad. Over all I think it's acceptable. However, I'm going to try to re-process it a little with this new stock in mind and re-layout where the Ka-Blam ad goes. I forgot that I can shave off a few cents if I place the Ka-Blam ad on the outside back cover instead of the interiors. I can then pass the savings onto the reader.

Onto the second issue's 2nd test print.

Too Blue.

The blues I used on the cover got pushed too far into the Cyan range. The blue of this cover was planned to be lighter and closer to a baby-blue range. The light shadow's on the character's faces got printed pretty dark, almost as dark as the outline that surrounds them. The lighter colors are pushed to far to the white range. Contrast withing the blues is too much. And on top of that I'm not to crazy about the color of blue it's in.

The interior changes I did are looking okay. Some are more successful than others, some light colors are still to bright, but over all it's looking good in there.

Okay, so back to the coloring board! Almost there! Good morning and God Bless!